Painted Pivka is a multi-year project (2022–2025) of the Hiša kulture in Pivka gallery, which explores wall painting, its expression, scope and significance in the public space, using the example of a small town like Pivka.

As known, the central significance of mural painting is that it brings art into the public sphere. In this way, the artwork reaches the widest possible audience, including visitors who never venture into the gallery, and can at the same time become (or is) an effective medium of social communication. Given that Pivka had no public murals before this project, it seems particularly apt to investigate what effects murals can have on the town's residents, the relationships between them and the overall social atmosphere. Hiša kulture therefore considers the project as a kind of laboratory for exploring the relationship between art and society, and hopes that it will make an important contribution to the development of the visual image of the city and the promotion of visual art in general.

In 2022, the painter Leon Zuodar created a mural entitled Artist at Work in the courtyard behind Hiša kulture, which thematises the work of the artist, their contribution to the development of society and the social perception of contemporary art.

The following year, the painter and illustrator Petra Preželj depicted a mural on the supporting wall of Vrtec Mavrica. Interweaving figures of animals, plants, people and fantastic creatures on a background of abstract patterns and landscape elements, the mural remains open to interpretation, as the artist suggests with the title – Tell a Story.

This year, the painter Marko Šajn created a mural on the wall of a building near the railway station on the main road through Pivka. The artist conceived the mural in relation to its location. It shows a freeze-frame of the everyday hustle and bustle – people in a hurry to run errands, go shopping or go to work, darting off to board the train with their travelling bags or looking for a place to hitch a ride with rucksacks on their shoulders. What they all have in common is movement; they are all more or less in a rush and not one of them is at a standstill. The figures are painted in the artist's characteristically simple style, highly stylised, even typified, without facial features, with the same hairstyle and wearing the same clothes. Besides that, this time they are depicted only in outline, in a single brown colour, so that they appear like silhouettes that pass by too quickly to make out the details. All this suggests that the mural refers to Pivka as a place of passage, showing it as a place that everyone uses to merely pass through or cross or change trains, and where nobody stops, so in a sense, as a non-place.

The project is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Pivka and Slovenske železnice d.o.o., which kindly donated the space.